How to Kill 600,000 Americans?

that's an interesting article. It proves that you can kill more people with a briefcase than you can with a gun.

In the article, it was stated that the obama administration argued that without the keynesian shot in the arm in the form of a stimulus , unemployment would have flirted with 9 % .With it 8%. In reality , as unemployment is measured, it flirting with 10%.

I am not defending the stimulus program in anyway, but there is something inherent in the stimulus that makes measured unemployment higher than it would be otherwise (notice I said measured, not real) .

Included in the stimulus plan is money for extended unemployment benefits which is administered through the individual states unemployment benefits program. Before the stimulus, for the most part a person could collect for 26 weeks and that was it. Whether that person got a job or not afterwards didn't matter. The person would no longer be counted as unemployed, he would essentially disappear.

With the stimulus program, a person can now go 72 weeks collecting(based on what a few of my unemployed friends tell me) . So we have people who are still be counted as unemployed who in times recently passed would have fallen off the rolls and would have not been included in the unemployment figures. Everything else being equal, if the stimulus did not include the extended unemployment benefits, the measured unemployment rate would be lowered.

As for the real unemployment rate(which includes those still out of work who fell off the rolls ), some put that at 25% , some 20% . But that is a different issue.